If He Had to be French...

The editor of the Times Literary Supplement on why the Nobel selection was merely a minor insult to the Americans, after all.

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature loves America—the America before Columbus arrived most of all.

The secretary of the $1.4 million prize had already dismissed the US as “too isolated, too insular” for the taste of the Swedish jury this year.

So a European winner from the continent Horace Engdahl calls the “centre of the literary world,” seemed always more likely than a call for Philip Roth.

Le Clézio is not a fully paid member of the Washington-hating Paris intelligentsia. But his subjects are commonly the peoples erased by dominant cultures—in America, Africa and the Pacific.

The actual choice—of the 68-year old French novelist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio—is merely a pinch of salt in the American wound.

Le Clézio—known to his admirers as JMG—is not a fully paid member of the Washington-hating Paris intelligentsia.

He is a wanderer who spends time at his family home in Mauritius, in Nice, and in New Mexico.

But his subjects are commonly the peoples erased by dominant cultures—in America, Africa and the Pacific.

His first book, Le Proces Verbal (1963), is still his best known outside France. Its story of a lost boy in Nice, who grapples with both philosophy and a lost girl on a billiard table, has echoes of Albert Camus, an earlier French Nobel winner.

The experimental text included crossed out words and newspaper cuttings of the hero's admissions to psychiatric hospital. The Times Literary Supplement praised at the time the book’s “own form of lucid lyricism which suggests that he might one day produce something quite remarkable.”

His early work was also much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously declined the Nobel. In L'Extase Materielle, he took on the existential master's scale of priorities, the “être of the material world over the neant of the human mind,” as the Times Literary Supplement put it. In 1976 Le Clézio translated fragments of Mayan Chronicles, Les Propheties du Chilam Balam. In 1980 he added Trois Villes Saintes, a barely readable exercise in shamanistic geography.